


elementary, he said

by Wagandea



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Character Study, Dom/sub Undertones, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, Not Safe Sane and Consensual, Period-Appropriate Language, References to Sherlock Holmes, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 02:10:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19263841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagandea/pseuds/Wagandea
Summary: There is a party, of course, and drinking. Arthur’s glass tastes a bit funny, or at least his company does.





	elementary, he said

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OllieTamale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OllieTamale/gifts).



> Thank you to Ollie for the ~~terrible~~ unusually specific prompt of "Arthur getting absolutely railed by Jeremy, who's holding it over him that Arthur wanted to sleep with Ciel." And here you thought I wouldn't do it. This is probably the strangest piece I've written in a while, so enjoy!
> 
> As with all of my canonverse works (unless specified), this is written to loosely fit in with the manga (this fic in particular takes place vaguely after the murder arc), so Ciel should still be about 13 here, though you're welcome to imagine him older if you wish.

                    **i.**

“I can’t say I care much for these parties,” There is something just simmering beneath the surface of the Earl’s mask at all times. Tonight he looks rather bored, standing off to the side of the ballroom with a glass held stiffly aloft in one hand; but he looks rather _less_ bored when he looks at Arthur. “I prefer a more intimate gathering of… friends,” and said as though he’s never _had_ one of those.

Tonight, Arthur won’t wonder why he is here.

They talk of his stories upon Ciel’s prompting, and drink, and half-observe the crowd. Arthur notices, far too late, that the Earl’s butler is conspicuously absent. A man without his shadow looks strange, unnatural. There’s something wrong with the light. He has another glass of champagne for his nerves.

“Why don’t we go somewhere quieter to talk, Doctor?” Ciel murmurs, eyelashes drooping at the corners in a way that would be convincing enough had Arthur not known him so. Ciel’s thin hand curls around his elbow, something possessive, _you will follow my lead won’t you?_ He had been convinced, once, and the metal clink of the handcuffs echoes in his mind as a permanent reminder. Arthur wants, inexplicably, to stretch his hand out for Ciel’s eyepatch still.

He will go with him anyway.

Later, much later, Arthur will write in the guise of a familiar lovesick narrator about another man with cold eyes and lovely white hands: _Sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence._

 

                    **ii.**

Sherlock Holmes is a conjuration, a fantasy, a distorted portrait of three men Arthur might be able to fool himself into thinking he could have loved. It’s a cruel thing, what he does, takes the _interesting_ parts and stitches them all together in some frankensteined mess. And what a glorious, beautiful mess he is; Dr. Bell’s mind, and the Earl’s coldness, and the perfect peculiarities of that _thing_ they call a butler. Sherlock Holmes, in a word, is _indulgent_.

He does not _like_ the creature he has created. (Later, much later, Arthur will try to kill him. He never will have the stomach for it.) There is something to say about desire, about shame. Dr. Watson (though Arthur will never be able to afford the words to a page) _loves_ Sherlock Holmes, and is perhaps even loved in return; while Arthur, on the worst days, finds himself consumed by the text.

The creature is perched with legs crossed on the bed in that old guest bedroom from the Phantomhive case when he has been led by the Earl to that promised _somewhere quieter._  The hand at his arm tightens, Ciel’s thin fingers claw-like in the dark.

He is a beautiful thing, torn straight from a page of The Strand, Sidney Paget’s loving illustrations come to life. Arthur doesn’t know how he didn’t see it before.

This is a gift.

“Oh,” he exhales softly, and feels very suddenly faint.

“Are you alright, Doctor?” the man who is not _really_ Jeremy Rathbone calls from his place on the bed, and Arthur feels foolishly, overwhelmingly, like his own protagonist. Where Arthur Conan Doyle ends and Dr. John Watson begins is fuzzy, it’s indistinct. Arthur hasn’t felt like himself since March, that stormy night, a dead man at his feet. “Drank a bit too much? Perhaps a bit of a lie down would be best.”

“Yes,” Arthur mumbles, swaying in place as though the shadows in the room are tugging gently at him from all directions at once. _There was something in my drink,_ he wants to say, but the words get caught in his throat. _You’ve drugged me._ “Yes, I ought to do just that.”

He forgets the rest.

 

                    **iii.**

His wrists strain in the metal cuffs, and the chain connecting them makes a cold sound where it’s tethered harshly to the bed frame. They were no more comfortable the first time. His protests are too feeble, can’t speak, can barely move; the room slowly oscillating around him and the only fixed point in space being Jeremy’s gloved fingers working methodically at the buttons of his trousers.

The Earl’s pet has gone off-script again tonight, or so the minute frustrated hardening of Ciel’s expression indicates; when the room has stopped spinning long enough for Arthur to perceive him in his chair across the room. The boy has crafted this scenario, and he will oversee its execution.

And then, there is the demon.

Arthur has a dreadful habit of getting lost in his own head, and though it’s proved an embarrassment in intimate situations prior, here it seems an advantage. Jeremy’s countenance is far more interesting than the lightly painful stroke of his gloved hands on Arthur’s cockstand (he is erect, but _when_ did he—it doesn’t matter, now). For a while, while his body is occupied with the stimulus of Jeremy pulling him off, Arthur’s drugged mind can wander freely.

“What do you observe, Doctor?”

Jeremy bears down further when the Earl speaks. The hard, reserved set of his lips could indicate reluctance, and the force of his hand touches on some emotion Arthur can’t quite place—until Arthur’s eyes wander again to the Earl and _ah,_  Arthur sighs vacantly when he is very suddenly pushed hard against the headboard with a cold clink of the cuffs. Jealousy, then, jealousy the wrong way, not for Arthur but _of_ him.

This was a gift for Arthur, but _perhaps,_  perhaps it was intended as a punishment for the demon as well.

 _What do you observe, Vicar?_ Arthur wants to ask, he _wants_ to, the creature before him as captivating as he is entirely alien, and what follows must be a strike of inspiration. Arthur Conan Doyle, meet Sherlock Holmes.

Jeremy speaks, then. To his credit, Arthur supposes, Jeremy is as cool and focused as the character he partially inspired even so. “You seem preoccupied, Doctor.” These thin fingers, these sinewy forearms. A tremendous strength, that no one on the page will ever credit to him. “I can’t help but assume you had hoped to lay with the Earl Phantomhive instead.” The menacing, unnatural baritone to his voice Arthur will leave. The hawk-like nose and the quick, subversive wit he will take. “I _do_ wonder what might have happened that night, had our script not depended upon my interruption.”

What Jeremy provides in physicality, he lacks in brilliance. His words may make an ugly flush crawl up Arthur’s skin, but if they are right they are not right _enough._  Arthur’s eyes wander, and he focuses his thoughts in, instead, upon the boy presiding over them. Wants dearly to ask: _What do you observe, Earl?_

“Though I’m uncertain my master would have had the taste for it,” the demon murmurs venomously at his ear, and it is just as well.

 

                    **iv.**

“That is _enough,_ ” Ciel snaps from the chair, and it is so thoroughly cold and authoritative that though the command is not meant for Arthur it elicits a low whimper from him nonetheless.

A pause, Jeremy’s red eyes gone bright fuschia and slitted in the dark, his whole body tensed as though he's been struck. “Yes, my lord.” And Jeremy— _Sebastian_ —pulls back and pulls out obediently, his cockstand wet and glaring in the light as it emerges with an obscene noise, and Arthur’s twitching in protest on his stomach; a release that is not a release. Arthur’s chin dips forward to rest on his chest, panting.

The moment that passes is colder than anything Arthur has ever felt. When he risks to look back up, Jeremy’s expression has rearranged itself to something perfectly quiet and docile, a well-minded beast. What power the Earl has over a creature so horrible is beyond the willingness of Arthur’s comprehension. He feels cottony in the head, tongue heavy in his mouth.

“Again,” Ciel instructs, something hard and careless in the unhappy set of his mouth. “And keep your mouth _shut_ this time, Sebastian.”

Arthur directs him an unspoken appreciation; the thing is easier to pretend in the silence of observation.

 

                    **v.**

Dr. Watson is useless, if not as a conductor of the light. Oh, he does alright, in the fictional world sprawling out in Arthur’s head, when he is not at Holmes’ side. Those are the moments which don’t bear writing down, uninteresting and uninspired. To love him, and to be loved by him, that is what makes John Watson luminous. Not as his own light, but as the moon reflects the sun.

Arthur stays on the bed for a long time, the room oscillating around him, and wakes eventually in his own flat. As though he had simply retired to bed early, had forgeone the invitation and foregone taking a cab to the Phantomhive estate entirely.

He recalls, hazily:

The nauseating visage of Sebastian Michaelis peeling back the mask, and the Earl running a hand through the demon’s hair as though handling a dog. Jeremy Rathbone is no more, never was in the first place. He has come from his chair to the side of the bed, and there is a lingering kiss passed from Ciel to the demon that Arthur cannot be certain he did not simply imagine; open-mouthed and forceful, a performative and unpleasant action. It is the most amount of affection Arthur has ever seen the Earl grant a thing.

Ciel releases Arthur from his restraints himself, leans over the cotton-headed, heavy-tongued man who is not John Watson and murmurs with the clink of the key in the locks: “Good-night, Mister Arthur Doyle.”

Arthur wears the marks from the metal cuffs on his wrists until they fade, and feels for those few days luminous himself.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://wagandea.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/celestewritings)


End file.
